Safety first
Could anyone who can see the small parts and sharp edges on Jason Higgs’s freebie please point them out to us, and more
importantly to him, before the corridors of Caradon District Council reverberate with the sound of his screams of pain as he slices his hand open on it.
You can see why Jason’s gift is called a stress ball.
Search and enjoy?
There’s widespread concern over the problem of one of our readers searching for his local sandwich shop and instead being directed to his local escort agency, as reported last week.
‘I can’t imagine what search terms Neil Adamson must have been using to find "Lovely Baps",’ says James Tait, at Morse. ‘Both Yell.com and Google turn up accurate results for our local sandwich bar.’
You wouldn’t expect that James would be directed to an escort agency, until you consider that his local shop is called, ahem, Fanny’s Sandwich Bar.
Bad connection
We have, on occasion, highlighted BT’s efforts to explain its services and payment plans. This email comes from Andrew Webb, who received a letter from BT trying to tempt him back to the fold.
‘We don’t charge connection fees on any of your calls (we do have a 5p minimum call fee, but it only applies if the cost of the call is less than 5p),’ it stated.
Which, claims Andrew, means the following: ‘So, all calls cost at least 5p, but that’s not a connection fee, and the minimum fee only applies when the call charge is less than the minimum fee.’
The camera never lies
It has been too long since we featured a really dull webcam – and this week we have two. So when Richard Vidler sent us details of Hi-Tech Printing’s two webcams with the message: ‘I hope they aren’t too exciting’, we were intrigued. Five minutes later, we saw how inappropriate that reaction was.
‘Watch the production of your job – LIVE!’, the web site promises. And if you want to watch a ‘Hamada press’ – whatever that is – you certainly need a hobby. Go to: http://www.hi-techprinting.com/HTML_Pages/camera.html.
Fat controller
But you need no excuses for watching the entirely fictitious British Lard Marketing Board’s Lard-cam, suggested by Gemma Craven (http://www.zen8595.zen.co.uk/lard/lard_cam.html).
This in a week when The Guardian reports that there’s a national lard shortage, thanks to demand from Eastern Europe. Is there a shortage? Check out a supermarket near you, and let us know.
Phantom menace
Thanks to reader Tony Hammond, who spotted a story about Derbyshire County Cricket Club changing its name from the Scorpions to the Phantoms, and then suffering from an England and Wales Cricket Board computer system glitch that meant the press release was emailed out to national newspapers not just once, but in some cases up to 7,000 times.
No thanks to Tony, who signs off: ‘Phantoms? Must have been a ghost in the machine.’ Groan!
In it for the money
Sometimes we see jobs that are clearly priced to attract only offshore applicants, but there are some salaries which surely anyone would think twice about applying for.
With that in mind, here’s this week’s job of the week, supplied by Adam Godsby. ‘Our client requires a Web Services Developer to work in a small team supporting, maintaining and creating internet- and intranet-based computer systems. These systems will be created using a number of technologies, but primarily C#/ASP.NET, Coldfusion, Visual Studio, MS IIS, MS SQL Server 2000 and IBM UDM. At least six months’ experience of each package is essential. Crawley. Permanent. £40 per year.’ Presumably the location is an incentive.
Language lesson
Chris Punter and Caseworks raise the bar on our foreign poetry thread by being the first to quote the schoolboy favourite that not only makes sense in English, but is proper Latin, too: ‘Caesar adsum iam forte/Brutus adarat/Caesar sic in omnibus/Brutus sic inat’.
Molly Mockford, at Pagination Associates, supplies a version with ‘sic intram’ as the last two words, which maintains the public transport theme.
And while on the subject of old jokes in other languages: ‘How about the French Naval Academy’s motto, "To the water, it is the hour",’ says E.D. Wivens, at Katzphur. ‘Or, in French, "a l’eau, c’est l’heure".’
Of sonnets and spellchecks
This is the sort of poetry we like. Not only is it a real poem – or it was until Sue Murphy, at Ena Shaw, got to it – but it passes our spellchecker: ‘Thee howl ant thee pew sea kit wont two see/Inner bee you tea full pee grin bout/Thy tuck sum hone he/Ant plant tea off moan he/Ripped up inner fauve punt knot.’
Paws for thought
If subservient chickens don’t take your fancy, perhaps we can tempt you with this. Rebecca Harris sent us the link to the infinite cat project. More than 3,000 people a day visit www.infinitecat.com, to look at pictures of kitties looking at pictures of kitties looking at pictures of kitties, ad infinitum (there‘s some proper Latin for you). Backbytes has a thing for funny cats, so don’t delay. Send your hilarious cat web sites to the usual address. 
Gone, but not forgotten
TV-B-Gone revisited. ‘With elections looming in the not too distant future, how about an MP-B-Gone?’ asks Mark Farrar. If only.
Up for adoption
Further to our piece last week on the scientific research that could identify your surname by examining your Y chromosome, except of course if you were a woman or someone who had changed their last name.
Angela Walker, at Skynet Applied Systems, points out that: ‘it wouldn’t be much use if you were adopted either.’ In fact, as a way of finding out your surname, it’s probably not quite as useful as asking your postman, but who are we to stand in the path of scientific invention?
Wouldn’t it be lovely?
Sometimes, though not often, we can tie together two of our threads in a rather neat and pleasing way.
However, thanks to Neil Adamson, at Caerus IT Solutions, we can link the Argos Chav search engine tale with your obsession with sandwiches, currently being played out in the hundreds of recipe emails we’re sending out to you.
‘I tried to find the number for my local sandwich shop at Yell.com,’ Neil writes. So he just typed in the name of the shop, and was surprisingly given a list of local escort agencies. You might imagine that the lunch hour is a pretty exciting time for Neil, but wait: Yell.com is searching only on the first word, or the first few letters of the first word, as Neil’s subsequent research confirmed.
Second, even if it was searching on the entire shop name, it would be easy to get the wrong kind of establishment. The shop Neil was looking for is called ‘Lovely Baps’.
Error terror
SQL2000 error number 8623 is this week’s featured error message. Our interest stems from Microsoft’s information on the error, as discovered by Nigel Crompton, at Bolton Sixth Form College.
‘This error is not based on any particular query construct. Also, this error is not limited to any particular database environment, to any particular amount of data, or to any particular kind of data. This error may first occur only sporadically. However, this error may occur repeatedly after the first time it occurs.’
Which, if you suffer from the error, you might not find terribly encouraging. ‘I can emphatically confirm that the last sentence is true,’ Nigel says.
Oh those crazy Russians
Another job of the week that you can’t resist: Alyson Smith reports this one from her local free newspaper: ‘Computer technician/financial analyst. Position for someone with excellent computer skills and experience in financial business. Must also be fluent in Russian. £5.70 ph.’ Surprisingly, with an Eastbourne location, this one hasn’t had any takers.
Chicken run
‘You wouldn’t just be wasting our time, would you?’ asks Anthony Bonner, at CSC, in answer to our thread on French poems. Of course not Anthony. You’re all perfectly capable of wasting your own time.
Which brings us to this: we don’t want to encourage you to eat an unbalanced and unhealthy diet, but judging from the 9lb burger and the odd sarnies, that ship seems to have sailed already, which means we can recommend Burger King’s webcam gimmick, still a hit seven months after lunch, sorry launch.
If you have a spare hour, go to www.subservientchicken.com, where you’ll find a webcam image of a person dressed as a chicken, in a living room, who does what you tell it to (within reason).
Already there are web sites listing the things it will do, and the things it won’t. It’s about as far from Ronald MacDonald and the Hamburglar as it’s possible to get.
Give it a go during your lunch hour, and see if it ever gets tired of being asked to play air guitar, moonwalk and riverdance. We haven’t tired of asking it yet.
Ode dear! Your poems are getting verse
No room for your English poems this week, more next week. However, last week we brought you meaningless French poetry. What could be more pointless?
We ask, and luckily Gavin Hardy, at Creative Direction, was on hand to tell us. He helpfully supplies us with some meaningless Latin poetry: ‘Derigo forte oryx enumaro/Demo oryx demens trux/Fulgio casso pignus dux’.
Which, says Gavin, if you say it quickly enough, sounds like: ‘There they go/Forty lorries in a row/They aren’t lorries/They are trucks/Full of cows and pigs and ducks.’ Well… almost.
Just call us ‘Snackbites’
Just in time for Christmas, the ideal present for anyone who isn’t worth spending money on: the Backbytes Lunchtime Snack Book.
Well, it’s not really a book, it’s an email, but there’s no need to scour Amazon for it. Instead, just send a mail to Backbytes
entitled: ‘Yum’ and our magic automated system will send you the anthology of sandwich recipes published in our columns over the last couple of months, plus a few exciting ones that we’ve held back for publication.
We’d like to assure you that every recipe has been rigorously tested, but like most cookery writers these days, we’re far too busy for that tedious chore, so like everything that comes out of Backbytes, treat it with caution. Or better still, feed the sandwiches to your colleagues first.
Variety is the slice of life
Which leads us to our last set of sandwich recipes. First, one for all of you who feel that our student sandwiches are OK, but too extravagant. Michael Strelitz, at DataSafe Services, offers a recipe ‘developed by my father and his friends at boarding school as a way of making dry stale bread palatable’. Butter a slice of thick white bread. Score the butter with a knife. Pour over with Worcestershire sauce so it mostly soaks into the bread. Fold and eat.
A fork in the Black Forest
After you have chomped your way through a peanut butter and caviar sandwich, or even stale bread and Worcestershire sauce, you may wonder what to order for dessert. Don’t panic: Mark Daykin, at Reflex Data, has the answer.
‘We make a sandwich that we call Poor Man’s Black Forest Gateau,’ he says. ‘It’s chocolate spread and blackcurrant jam between two slices of bread. You can make a slightly more affluent version with the addition of a generous helping of Anchor squirty cream before slapping on the top slice.’ And with that, we burp heartily, and metaphorically call for the bill.
How to get ahead in advertising
‘Steve Ballmer could easily have been advertising Windows in the late 70s,’ says Clive Tiney, at Pindar plc. ‘Not actually having a working version (or even a non-working version) of a release has never been a reason for Microsoft not to announce a product.’
Silence is golden
As Mike Stranks points out, the Mobile-B-Gone that Steve Vincent suggested last week would be illegal. But Mike takes some comfort from forwarding sales details for the Zetron Cellphone Detector.
‘You’ve spent years preparing. You’ve rewritten the score at least twice. But your moment’s here at last… the house lights dim, a hush descends on the audience, the conductor raises his baton… and some moron’s mobile plays Für Elise!’
He warns us: ‘While we don’t have the power to reintroduce capital punishment, this great little gadget might help.’ It detects the polling signal from your mobile, and activates a recorded voice telling you to turn it off. Which wouldn’t be irritating at all.
The killer made just one fatal mistake…
Yet again, we turn to New Scientist for the stories that we couldn’t make up. This week: forensic scientists are developing a method for working out your surname from your DNA. Presumably unable to manipulate the little strings to spell the word, they are instead going on the assumption that men inherit their surname from their fathers along with their Y chromosome, so matching the Y chromosome gives a name to look for. This leaves only two ways for the master criminal to escape surname discovery by the gene police. The first one is to change his name. The second is to be a woman. It just might work.
Could you put this together again?
After last week’s diversion into French, Nick Lines, at Unisys, has found a site with more poetry written in French but which sounds like it makes sense in English.
‘It’s brain-mashing stuff,’ he warns, but luckily there’s an explanation. After all, you might be driven mad for days on end trying to work out the famous English verse that begins Un petit d’un petit/S’étonne au hall. (Clue: it’s a nursery rhyme).
Still stumped? Pop over to The French Concoction at http://members.aol.com/jbjanguish/french.htm.
Multilingual… and multilingual
Andy Huntley was browsing an online job site to find jobs for someone else (well, that’s his story) and discovered our job of the week for this issue.
‘European Systems IT and business development manager, Wimbledon…An Accountancy company based in London is looking for an All Rounder with the following skills: Visual Basic, Access, VBA, SQL, HTML and ASP. You must also have a Degree in IT or Computing and speak and write ALL of the following: English, Russian, Ukrainian, Bulgarian and Polish.’
As the job description concludes: ‘Not too much to ask!’ For this, you can expect to earn £27,500 per year.’
All those out there who fit these requirements, form an orderly queue.
Spellbound
More homophone poems. There’s quite a backlog here, because you can’t read more than a few at a time without feeling a headache coming on.
Darell Ridell submits an ode to his spell checker: ‘It snot that eye am daft a tall/Eye merely can not spell/For my key bored it as got to old/An ditz not bin feline well’.
‘Eye ewes ah rye Ming dick shun airy/Ones every noun then,’ begins Dave Jakeman. ‘Four with sum luck, eye get unstuck/Then off eyes tried a gain/Butt udders steak this serious lee…’ aargh, we can’t take any more.
Our favourite this week: David Richardson gets a homophone carol past the spell checker: ‘Sigh lent knight/Wholly knight/Hall hiss charm/Hall hiss rite/Ground yen verge inn/Mutter hand chilled…’ and so on.
How to get a bug in your system
Before we get to sandwiches, we whet your appetite with news about the suitability of the woodlouse for human consumption.
First, Jim Bassett, at AIB, sends a link to a woodlouse recipe site: www.geocities.com/~gregmck/woodlice/recipes.htm. ‘The author seems worryingly uncertain as to the suitability of the woodlouse for human consumption,’ he warns.
Monty Wood, at Amber Business Computers, who started this whole thing, points us to the same site. ‘The sushi sounds suitable for sandwich filling – or perhaps the woodlice fritters, said to taste like whitebait,’ he adds.
The laughing policemen of Assam
See, the thing with naming and shaming is, you’re not meant to do it to yourself. So posting a message on your web site to say that: ‘this profession probably is the most misunderstood one. Every force, every agency has its quota of sadists, eccentrics and deviants... so has this profession,’ might seem like an odd thing to do.
It’s not the oddest thing on the Assam Police web site (www.assampolice.com) though, where the force has asked visitors to post jokes about the police, so that the police officers, both sadists and deviants, can improve their image.
‘The police too have a lighter side. There are plenty of jokes, anecdotes and pleasant encounters with humour,’ the web site tells us. ‘Our effort would be to provide fun and pleasure with special reference to the men in uniform.’
If you can think of a police joke that you can legally place on a web site, then now might be the time to offshore it to Assam.
In other words...
Paul Jobling works out that we’re after homophones (which sound the same), not homonyms (which sound the same but are spelled the same as well). But you all seem to have got the idea. We have lots of homophone poems already: remember, they have to make it cleanly through your spell-checker to count. An early pleasure was a poem from Bill Carey and North Ayrshire Council:
Eye yam a cisterns anal-list/A programmer all sew aye bee/Eye sit awl day buy me consul/Anne quay inn scrip, ewe sea.
And from Anne Humphreys: When yew work in IT/Things arbour in EweSea/And thyme sloe lea goes bye…
More next week, and keep sending them in. We leave you with a French example. ‘When a former colleague of mine resigned her job to go and start a new life in France, someone wrote in her card: "Pas d’elle yeux Rhoneque nous",’ writes John Harrison, at Anite Housing. If you don’t get it after 30 minutes, ask your mate, not us.
Computing readers digest
Only two weeks of sandwich recipes to go! Next week we’ll give you instructions on how to mail us and receive the Backbytes sandwich recipe book (actually it’s an email) by return. You can print it out and solve your Christmas present problems instantly.
This week, we let your relatives have a go. ‘According to my father-in-law, the perfect sandwich is simple – two pieces of bread, cold Brussels sprouts, and Branston pickle,’ says Craig Browning, at Milklink Processing. ‘Apparently it has rather interesting side-effects’.
‘My uncle, when he was young, would apparently only eat bread, marmalade, and hardboiled eggs. So I tried a hardboiled egg and marmalade sandwich once. Tasted fine,’ says Thomas Rushton, at Fox Hayes Solicitors. We wonder about the side-effects of that one, too.
My husband likes mandarin sandwiches with cornflakes instead of crisps to get the extra crunch,’ says Sue Nanninga, at Medical Specialist Group. ‘His dad used to have Angel Delight sandwiches.’
This is your captain squeaking
We’re always pleased to hear about new types of computer, and especially pleased to hear of a useful purpose for rats.
So good news from the New Scientist this week – rat brain cells in a Petri dish have flown a virtual F-22 fighter jet, and could crew airplanes and test for epilepsy.
Thomas DeMarse, from the University of Florida, explains that cells grew interconnections and have become a ‘live computation device’. They took in information from the virtual flight and used it to correct the flight path. Within 18 months, rat brains will be able to accomplish simple tasks – such as writing Backbytes.
DeMarse’s former supervisor comments that a brain in a dish that is a real pilot is a long way off, although we wonder if the budget airlines might be looking with interest at the probable salary demands of a rat brain cell pilot...
A dream job
It has been a while since we offered a job of the week. Too long, so thanks to Jon Szwer, at Gordon & Gotch Publishing, for passing on this offer that he couldn’t refuse. Sorry, couldn’t understand.
‘The company on development web project are required Financial Leader (permanent or temporary work). You it is necessary whole only pair hours a day for this work, rest we shall teach you. The company guarantees the social package, honesty in cooperation, ensuring the salary beforehand on acceptance on work, vacation.
‘Acceptance is realized on competitive base. We are pleased each workman! Salary from 5000 pounds in mounth.’
We assume this was written by some rat brain cells at the University of Florida.
How to be in remote control
Steve Vincent, at Barclays Bank, is excited about the possibilities of the TV-B-Gone, which we featured last week.
‘I hope that the inventor raises enough capital from sales to expand his range.
‘I’d like to suggest a Mobile-B-Gone that allows you to switch off any mobile phone within the range of the same train carriage, lift or Starbucks.
‘Looking further ahead, the sight of white earphones could have you reaching for your Ipod-B-Gone.’
